Home Words: Discourses of Children’s Literature in Canada

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

RESEARCH FOR THE ESSAYS IN THIS COLLECTION and the consultations and meetings of the researchers were supported by a multi-year grant for collaborative research from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada through its Research Development Initiatives program . Additional funding came from the University of Winnipeg; Grande Prairie Regional College, Alberta; the University of Victoria; Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia; and the Australasian Children’s Literature Association for Research. This book, a major result of the research collaboration, has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada. Behind the authors of the various chapters in the book stands a group of able research assistants. Over the four years of our research, these included Kelly Burns, Charlotte Fortier, Sara Harms, Laura Jakal, Robbie Richardson, Melanie Dennis Unrau, Matt Reimer, Andrea Siemens, Andrew Reimer, Andrea Hutchinson, Maria Reimer, Charlie Peters, Sophie Walker, Janice Banser, and James Nahachewsky. We were helped in our work by office and administrative staff members in all our institutions . Special thanks are due to Rebecca Stillwell, of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, at the University of Winnipeg, and Sophia Sherman, in the office of the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Alberta, for going well beyond the call ix A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S of duty. We were aided in the preparation of this manuscript by the careful work of Jayne Hildebrand, Honours English student at the University of Winnipeg, and by the incomparable Sharlee Reimer, Research Coordinator in the Centre for Research in Young People’s Texts and Cultures at the University of Winnipeg, whose energy drove us through the last months and weeks of detailed work, checking, and rechecking required by such an undertaking. Ongoing conversations with colleagues and administrators sustained many of us in our intellectual work. We thank, in particular, members of the Department of English and the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at the University of Winnipeg. All of us were borne up, too, by the friends and families who are the wind beneath our wings. The project was unique in the extent of the exchange of views and resources, reworking of drafts, and testing and challenging of ideas among the collaborators in what we called the Childplaces project, or, more simply , the Home project. This book is the result of the agreement of twelve people to work closely with one another over several years and is a testament to their passion, their patience, their tenacity, their sense of humour, and their goodwill. Q Q Q x Acknowledgements ...